Repeated antibiotic use helps bacteria multiply faster
Bacteria multiply faster if antibiotic are used repeatedly, warns a new study. This is in addition to resistance that bacteria develop with repeated antibiotic use.
This is reason enough for both, the doctor and the patient, to be careful with antibiotics.
The patient should not pester (trouble) the doctor to prescribe the antibiotic…let the doctor decide.
The finding signifies the importance of using the right antibiotic on patients as soon as possible.
The researchers in this study exposed E.coli bacteria to 8 rounds of antibiotic treatment over 4 days and found the bug had increased antibiotic resistance with each treatment.
E.coli can cause severe stomach pain, diarrhoea and kidney failure.
Antibiotic resistance is expected, but what was not expected was to find that the mutated E.coli reproduced faster than before encountering the drugs and formed populations that were 3 times larger because of mutation.
Doxycycline was the antibiotic chosen to test the effect on E.coli as part of a study of DNA changes brought about by antibiotics.
This was only seen in bacteria exposed to antibiotics and when researchers withdrew the drug, the evolutionary changes continued and the new-found abilities remained, said the study published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.
‘Our research suggests there could be added benefits for E.coli bacteria when they evolve resistance to clinical levels of antibiotics,’ said lead author Robert Beardmore, Professor at University of Exeter in Britain.
‘It’s often said that Darwinian evolution is slow, but nothing could be further from the truth, particularly when bacteria are exposed to antibiotics,’ Beardmore said.
‘Bacteria have a remarkable ability to rearrange their DNA and this can stop drugs working, sometimes in a matter of days,’ Beardmore explained.
‘It is said by some that drug resistance evolution doesn’t take place at high dosages but our paper shows that it can and that bacteria can change in ways that would not be beneficial for the treatment of certain types of infection,’ Mark Hewlett, also of the University of Exeter, pointed out.
‘This shows it’s important to use the right antibiotic on patients as soon as possible so we don’t see adaptations like these in the clinic,’ Hewlett noted.
